Bart has resurrected his blog and is focusing on using portal technology in real-life applications. Allthough not as technical as Mart's Sharepoint blog, but certainly worth the reading, if you're implementing portal technology for your (internal) customers.

His first post, "Clients demand sharepoint, but sometimes lack portalvision..." , discusses the dissapointment some customers will feel, when they realise Sharepoint will not solve all their problems and world hunger, without a clear understanding what their problems are or without support from the entire organisation. 

The Microsoft® Office Information Bridge Framework is a set of software components, tools, and prescriptive guidance that enable developers to create solutions that connect Microsoft Office System applications to virtually any enterprise system or application.

Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework 1.0 BETA

Microsoft Office IBF SDK beta

Didn't get to try it out yet, since I only run VS.Net 2005 at home, but it looks very cool.

update:

More information is available in the Office Developer Center.

Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas are available contianing Overview articles on WordprocessingML (the XML file format for Microsoft Office Word 2003), SpreadsheetML (Microsoft Office Excel 2003) and FormTemplate XML schemas (Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003). This updates the previous release which only contained the schema for WordML.